Musk Alleges ‘Shakespearean’ Betrayal in Revived OpenAI Lawsuit

Elon Musk has reportedly resurrected his suit against OpenAI, the AI startup he helped found.

The world’s richest man had sued the artificial intelligence (AI) company in March, only to withdraw the suit in June one day before it was set to go to trial.

Now, he has resumed the legal action, once again accusing OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of violating the company’s founding principles by prioritizing profits over the larger common good, The New York Times reported Monday (Aug. 5).

Musk alleges that Altman and Brockman, with whom he teamed in 2015 to launch OpenAI, abandoned the company’s original mission of humanity-focused AI when they teamed up with benefactor — and rival — Microsoft.

Musk, the suit says, was “betrayed by Mr. Altman and his accomplices … the perfidy and deceit is of Shakespearean proportions.”

OpenAI has said it had planned to move to have the suit dismissed, arguing that it remains committed to a mission to “ensure AGI benefits all of humanity,” in reference to artificial general intelligence, a version of AI that can think and reason on pace with human beings.

OpenAI said at the time that it realized AGI will require “far more resources than we’d originally imagined,” and that the company and Musk agreed in 2017 that a for-profit entity would be needed to acquire those resources. The company also says it advances its mission by building beneficial tools that are widely available.

Musk has also sought to ban Apple devices at his companies — which include X, Tesla and SpaceX — if they integrate OpenAI at the operating system (OS) level. This came  after Apple announced it was teaming with OpenAI and will integrate that company’s ChatGPT 4o artificial intelligence chatbot into iOS, macOS and iPadOS.

“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies,” Musk said in a post on X. “That is an unacceptable security violation.”

“And visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage,” Musk added in a later post.

The multibillionaire last year founded his own AI company, dubbed xAI, which recently began training its AI chatbot Grok on X – formerly Twitter – user accounts.